Day 10: GLAD Expedition – Another day, Another drifter

This morning contained the entirety of our “S2” deployment. Three hours of ripping around our drop site left us with a total of 214 transmitting GLAD units in the water. For those of you don’t track this kind of thing on your own, this means that the Grand Lagrangian Deployment is now the largest (by number of drifters) drifter deployment experiment, well, ever. And we’ve still got about 100 more to go. So, in lieu of celebratory champagne (UNOLS policy forbids booze on their vessels), I expect a few “attaboy” e-mails from some of the other members of CARTHE. Take what you can get, right?

At the time of my writing this, our winch-operated CTD is in the midst of a 1500 meter cast (yes- it’s one of THOSE days). In truth, our device is less of a CTD and more of a CTDFDO (conductivity, temperature, depth, fluorescence, and dissolved oxygen). It’s fancy. Characterizing the physical processes in play by acquiring these vertical profiles from the water column is important. It will certainly be of interest as we begin to reconcile surface current data from the drifters with other measured physical quantities.

R/V Walton Smith

The final deployment (“S3”) will occur either Monday or Tuesday, so we’ve got some time between now and then to survey, organize, and construct. The scratches and splinter wounds perpetrated by the drifters during construction and movement will have healed by then. I guess this is what having a cat is like- minus the joys of cleaning up random dabs of poo or the animals’ characteristically conditional love.

On the more mundane side of things, I took advantage of this afternoon by doing my laundry. That is all.

Nathan Laxague signing off (somewhere between moving his damp clothes to the dryer and finagling with threateningly large data sets).